Browsing All Posts published on »November, 2015«

Sections of rock’s avant-garde feel the need to dress themselves in the armour of technical facility, and indeed some of its practitioners are instrumental virtuosi who base their practice on complexity and sophisticated musical structures. Not The Chewers, who are somewhere to the left of even bands like Sonic Youth or Melvins, in terms of their relationship to the exigencies of performance and their reluctance to trot out any of the conventional significations of rock competence. This is not to say that their music sounds in-competent: it’s in time, it’s in tune, it’s assembled into coherent arrangements …

‘Literate’ is a term that some might use to characterise Dropout Patrol, and ‘erudite’ is another: neither is really up to the task. Sunny Hill is not a literate record in the sense of being wordy, or more concerned with meaning than feeling, and neither is its erudition of the obvious sort, presenting a succession of clever references or flash musical competencies. But this is a band that knows its language, that has schooled itself in the ways that sounds and stylistic tropes signify, presenting its insights with precision and nuance. There is never any possibility of substitution or paraphrase in the exact…

Oli

I'm a writer, and these are my friends.

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After a recent forced hiatus from writing music I’ve had an opportunity to reasess my creative priorities, and the varying demands they make on my time. I’ve come to the conclusion that between making music and writing fiction all of my unpaid creative time is more than spoken for, so I’ve regretfully had to make the decision to withdraw from writing music reviews. I no longer solicit submissions, and I will no longer write about music on a regular basis, although from time to time I may be moved to set fingers to keys in respect of something I’ve been listening to.